Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist

Arte Américas, the largest Latino Cultural Arts Center in the Central Valley, is proud to present Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist, a landmark exhibition featuring fifty works by the iconic artist Yolanda M. López (1942-2021). Curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, this extraordinary exhibition traces López’s artistic journey from 1975, when she entered graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, to the 1980s when she created her celebrated Guadalupe series.  

Bringing together a compendium of fifty works in oil pastel, paint, charcoal, collage, and photography—including never-before-exhibited self-portraits—the exhibition highlights López’s use of portraiture as a strategy for visualizing collective empowerment. With her superheroic self-portrait in running shoes, López produced one of earliest feminist transformations of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which, in the following decades, became a dominant theme in Chicanx art and literature and a genre in its own right—owing much to the prevalence of López’s work.